KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.) announced another significant technological contribution to cloud data center infrastructures. Today, the company expanded its broad portfolio of client, enterprise and data center SSDs with the addition of the XD6 Series. KIOXIA's E1.S form factor XD6 SSDs are the first Enterprise and Datacenter SSD Form Factor (EDSFF) E1.S SSDs to address the specific requirements of hyperscale applications, including the performance, power and thermal requirements of the Open Compute Platform (OCP) NVMe Cloud SSD Specification.

Designed to maximize system density, efficiency and simplicity, KIOXIA's EDSFF E1.x SSDs represent the future of flash storage for servers in cloud and hyperscale data centers. As defined by the EDSFF consortium and leveraging the OCP NVMe Cloud SSD Specification, the flexible, efficient, small form factor E1.S replaces the M.2 form factor and delivers greater density, performance, reliability, and thermal management. E1.S is also designed to be hot pluggable for increased serviceability, which is another benefit over M.2.

Facebook has recently announced that their gaming platform has launched several cloud-streamed games playable in the Android Facebook app and through the web browser on PC. The service has been in a limited beta for some time with over 200,000 people trying it in limited regions. Facebook makes it clear that the new offering is not intended to compete with more enthusiast options and will instead focus on low-power games on mobile and web. Facebook intends to target the 380 million people who play games through Facebook every month with native integration of cloud games alongside HTML5 games.

The service is launching with several latency-tolerant games including Asphalt 9: Legends, Mobile Legends: Adventure, PGA TOUR Golf Shootout, Solitaire: Arthur's Tale, and WWE SuperCard. Facebook won't be launching cloud games on iOS due to the uncertainty around the feature with Apple's current policies and the issues Microsoft has encountered trying to bring xCloud to Apple devices. Facebook Gaming cloud games are now available to try for customers across select US regions on the Facebook app for Android and on the web.

TerraMaster, a professional brand that specializes in providing innovative storage products including network-attached storage (NAS) devices, launches the F4-210 1 GB version, the same 4-bay NAS for personal cloud storage at a more affordable price. The TerraMaster F4-210 is just a portion of the price of an Intel-based NAS device. The F4-210 supports up to 108 TB of storage and supports 3.5" SATA hard drives and 2.5" SATA hard drives and solid-state drives.

The TerraMaster F4-210 is perfect for users that are looking for a powerful personal cloud storage solution without a hefty investment. Costing just half the price of an equivalent Intel x86 quad-core processor-based NAS storage, the F4-210 can deliver modest read/write speeds of up to 124 MB/s with two WD Red 4 TB hard drives in RAID 0. The F4-210 supports various private cloud services including Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive.

NVIDIA today announced a new kind of processor—DPUs, or data processing units—supported by DOCA, a novel data-center-infrastructure-on-a-chip architecture that enables breakthrough networking, storage and security performance.

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang revealed the company's three-year DPU roadmap in today's GPU Technology Conference keynote. It features the new NVIDIA BlueField -2 family of DPUs and NVIDIA DOCA software development kit for building applications on DPU-accelerated data center infrastructure services.

Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL) announced today that it was chosen to become TikTok's secure cloud technology provider. This technical decision by TikTok was heavily influenced by Zoom's recent success in moving a large portion of its video conferencing capacity to the Oracle Public Cloud.

"TikTok picked Oracle's new Generation 2 Cloud infrastructure because it's much faster, more reliable, and more secure than the first generation technology currently offered by all the other major cloud providers," said Oracle Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison. "In the 2020 Industry CloudPath survey that IDC recently released where it surveyed 935 Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) customers on their satisfaction with the top IaaS vendors including Oracle, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM and Google Cloud.... Oracle IaaS received the highest satisfaction score."

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, announced the Qualcomm Cloud AI 100, a high-performance AI inference accelerator, is shipping to select worldwide customers. Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 uses advanced signal processing and cutting-edge power efficiency to support AI solutions for multiple environments including the datacenter, cloud edge, edge appliance, and 5G infrastructure. The newly announced Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 Edge Development Kit is engineered to accelerate adoption of edge applications by offering a complete system solution for AI processing up to 24 simultaneous 1080p video streams along with 5G connectivity.

"Qualcomm Technologies is well positioned to support complete edge-to-cloud high performance AI solutions that lead the industry in performance per watt," said Keith Kressin, senior vice president and general manager, computing and edge cloud, Qualcomm Technologies. "Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 is now shipping to select worldwide customers and we look forward to seeing commercial products launch in the first half of 2021."

Thanks to the latest reportings from DigiTimes, we have obtained information that Apple has been working on expanding its data centers. According to Taiwan's server upstream supply chain, Apple has increased orders for its data centers, which have been growing starting from the second quarter of 2020. For the full year 2020, the orders are expected to be doubled, and the growth in purchasing is going to continue well into 2021. This purchasing decision from Apple comes after strong demand for its services like iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV, App Store, etc., all of which have millions of users. Being that Apple is expanding its data centers, that must represent a sign that Apple's user base is continuing to grow strongly.

The NAND Flash industry benefitted from strong demand for PCs and servers in 2Q20 as the COVID-19 pandemic caused a demand surge for cloud services and technologies that are related to working from home, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. This, in turn, kept demand high for SSDs. However, the smartphone and consumer electronics markets had not recovered from the impact of the pandemic. The demand for these products therefore declined compared to the previous quarter. In 2Q20, total NAND Flash bit shipment and ASP both experienced a minor increase of about 3% QoQ, while NAND Flash revenue reached US$14.5 billion, a 6.5% increase QoQ.

IBM today revealed the next generation of its IBM POWER central processing unit (CPU) family: IBM POWER10. Designed to offer a platform to meet the unique needs of enterprise hybrid cloud computing, the IBM POWER10 processor uses a design focused on energy efficiency and performance in a 7 nm form factor with an expected improvement of up to 3x greater processor energy efficiency, workload capacity, and container density than the IBM POWER9 processor.

Designed over five years with hundreds of new and pending patents, the IBM POWER10 processor is an important evolution in IBM's roadmap for POWER. Systems taking advantage of IBM POWER10 are expected to be available in the second half of 2021. Some of the new processor innovations include:

Cloud gaming is the next step in mobile gaming, with services like Microsoft project xCloud aiming to bring AAA titles right to your mobile phone. Microsoft has already been testing its xCloud application on Android and iOS devices for some time, and the application was supposed to launch sometime in September. However, it seems like Microsoft is only going to serve the customers on Android, as Apple says that these types of applications violate App Store guidelines. This doesn't only apply to xCloud, but also Google's Stadia gaming platform. When developer uploads application to App Store for iOS, the application goes through a review by Apple, for security reason and for Apple to check if it meets its guidelines.

Being that xCloud and Stadia are types of applications which offer a way to access many more applications (games in this case), this is against Apple's policy as they can't control the applications these services offer.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading computing, networking and storage solution innovator, and ownCloud, a leading open-source Content Collaboration Solution provider, today announced they have entered a global strategic partnership, combining QNAP's Network-attached Storage (NAS) with ownCloud's Enterprise Content Collaboration Software.

This long-term partnership focuses on providing ownCloud's Content Collaboration Solution for file sync and share, on all QNAP's NAS from QTS v4.4 onwards. In the coming months, the fully certified ownCloud Content Collaboration Solution will be available for easy installation from the QTS App Center. The installation packages are updated with every new release and continuously maintained in the interim period. Users can choose between the free Community Edition and the paid Enterprise Edition which includes premium features and professional support. Enterprise subscriptions will be available from the QNAP Software Store and upgrading from the Community to the Enterprise Edition will be straightforward and require no reinstallation.

AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) today announced revenue for the second quarter of 2020 of $1.93 billion, operating income of $173 million, net income of $157 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.13. On a non-GAAP basis, operating income was $233 million, net income was $216 million and diluted earnings per share was $0.18. "We delivered strong second quarter results, led by record notebook and server processor sales as Ryzen and EPYC revenue more than doubled from a year ago," said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. "Despite some macroeconomic uncertainty, we are raising our full-year revenue outlook as we enter our next phase of growth driven by the acceleration of our business in multiple markets."

D-Link this week introduced two new wireless devices to its leading network management solution, Nuclias Connect. The on-premise system elevates capabilities of internal IT teams who require reliable and total control of their organization's network. The Nuclias Connect expansion includes: AC2300 Wave 2 Access Point (DAP-2682) and Connect Hub Controller (DNH-100) that reinforce flexible and powerful offerings.

"As business networks grow in complexity and increased accessibility, advanced, easy to deploy and manage solutions are gaining industry traction. Nuclias Connect elevates today's wireless Internet connectivity for businesses, employees and guests while reducing the barrier to adopting a centrally managed networking system," said Raman Bridwell, vice president, products and services at D-Link Systems. "Organizations of various sizes, industries, and budgets benefit with the scalability of Nuclias Connect."

Kingston Digital, the flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., a world leader in memory products and technology solutions, today announced the addition of 128 GB capacity options to three of its encrypted USB flash drives. The drives are part of a full line of encrypted solutions to suit customer needs of all levels.

Consumers and organisations have become more aware of data privacy and protection needs due to regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. Additional data security options have become a necessity as work-from-home increases. The simple inclusion of encrypted USB flash drives into a daily workflow is a simple step to ensuring data is safe. Whether it's personal, company or client information, finding the right encrypted drive can make all the difference between peace of mind and the worry of loss of data.

AMD and Google Cloud today announced the beta availability of Confidential Virtual Machines (VMs) for Google Compute Engine powered by 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors, taking advantage of the processors' advanced security features. The first product in the Google Cloud Confidential Computing portfolio, Confidential VMs, enables customers for the first time to encrypt data in-use while it is being processed and not just when at rest and in-transit. Based on the N2D family of VMs for Google Compute Engine, Confidential VMs provide customers high performance processing for the most demanding computational tasks and enable encryption for even the most sensitive data in the cloud while it is being processed.

"At Google Cloud, we believe the future of cloud computing will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where users can be confident that the confidentiality of their data is always under their control. To help customers in making that transition, we've created Confidential VMs, the first product in our Google Cloud Confidential Computing portfolio," said Vint Cerf, vice president and chief internet evangelist, Google. "By using advanced security technology in the AMD EPYC processors, we've created a breakthrough technology that allows customers to encrypt their data in the cloud while it's being processed and unlock computing scenarios that had previously not been possible."

QNAP Systems, Inc. (QNAP), a leading computing, networking, and storage solution innovator, today introduced QuTScloud as its software-defined cloud NAS solution that enables the deployment of QTS, the QNAP NAS operating system, on to the cloud through license subscription.

For organizations which have stored most of their data on the cloud but lack a good management system to capitalize their digital assets, they can select from cloud service providers including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, and DigitalOcean to create a virtual QTS instance for the implementation of QuTScloud. Supporting advanced file management and collaboration that is unavailable from most cloud platforms, the cloud-based NAS is a great solution that not only optimizes usage of data stored on the cloud, but also benefits users from the expected file services and feature-rich NAS functionalities. Additional QuTScloud solution advantages include hybrid cloud collaboration, pay-as-you-go scalability, and cost-effectiveness.

Ampere today announced further roadmap details of its Ampere Altra server processor family. In March the company announced Ampere Altra, the world's first cloud native processor, featuring 80 cores. Today, Ampere unveiled preliminary details of the expansion of the cloud-native processor family by adding Ampere Altra Max, which has 128 cores, providing customers with another cloud-optimized processor to maximize overall performance and cores-per-rack density.

Ampere Altra Max is ideal for applications that take advantage of scale-out and elastic cloud architectures. Compatible with the 80-core Ampere Altra and also supporting 2-socket platforms, Ampere Altra Max offers the industry's highest socket-level performance and I/O scalability. It will be sampling in the fourth quarter and additional details will be provided later this year.

Microsoft is preparing to launch a competitive product to Google's Stadia and Amazon's Project Tempo, which are both game streaming services. To Microsoft's advantage, the company has experience in building gaming systems and using cloud technology to integrate them. While both Google and Amazon are cloud providers and have the infrastructure to implement game streaming services, Microsoft has its Xbox division, which has been in the gaming industry for a long time. Despite already owning the infrastructure, Microsoft wants to use the hardware from its Xbox consoles as a base of the upcoming game streaming service called Project xCloud.

According to sources of Tom Warren, senior editor at Verge, Microsoft will be re-using the Xbox SoCs found in their consoles. According to the source, in the beginning, Microsoft is going to use Xbox One S blades to power its game streaming service. After that, the company will upgrade its servers with more powerful Xbox Series X SoC. As a reminder, the Xbox Series X SoC has 8 Ryzen CPU cores based on "Zen 2" µarch, RDNA 2 GPU capable of delivering 12 TFLOPs, 16 GB of GDDR6 memory and a mighty fast SSD. This will be enough to satisfy game streaming service demands and power all of the AAA titles users will be playing once it is available.

AMD today announced that 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor powered Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) C5a instances are now generally available in the AWS U.S. East, AWS U.S. West, AWS Europe and AWS Asia Pacific regions.

Powered by a 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor running at frequencies up to 3.3Ghz, the Amazon EC2 C5a instances are the sixth instance family at AWS powered by AMD EPYC processors. By using the 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor, the C5a instance delivers leadership x86 price-performance for a broad set of compute-intensive workloads including batch processing, distributed analytics, data transformations, log analytics and web applications.

Power up your XR displays and 5G devices because NVIDIA is taking streaming to the next level. With the announcement today of the NVIDIA CloudXR 1.0 software development kit, we're bringing major advancements to streaming augmented reality, mixed reality and virtual reality content — collectively known as XR — over 5G, Wi-Fi and other high-performance networks.

With the NVIDIA CloudXR platform, any end device — including head-mounted displays (HMDs) and connected Windows and Android devices — can become a high-fidelity XR display capable of showcasing professional-quality graphics. CloudXR is built on NVIDIA RTX GPUs and the CloudXR SDK to allow streaming of immersive AR, MR or VR experiences from anywhere, whether from the data center, cloud or at the edge. And with NVIDIA GPU virtualization software, CloudXR scales efficiently allowing multiple users or tenants to securely share GPU resources.

Cloud data centers are evolving to an architecture that is accelerated, disaggregated and software-defined to meet the exponential growth in AI and high performance computing. To build these modern data centers, HPC and networking hardware and software must go hand in hand. NVIDIA provides the leading accelerated computing platform. Mellanox is the high-performance networking leader, now part of NVIDIA in a combination described in our founder and CEO's welcome letter.

Today we announce our plan to acquire Cumulus Networks, bolstering our networking software capabilities. The combination enables the new era of the accelerated, software-defined data center. With Cumulus, NVIDIA can innovate and optimize across the entire networking stack from chips and systems to software including analytics like Cumulus NetQ, delivering great performance and value to customers. This open networking platform is extensible and allows enterprise and cloud-scale data centers full control over their operations.

AMD and Oxide Games today announced a multi-year partnership to co-develop graphics technologies for the growing cloud gaming market. By combining leadership gaming hardware and graphics expertise from AMD with Oxide's proven development capabilities and innovative Nitrous game engine, the companies plan to create a robust set of tools and technologies for cloud rendering designed from the ground up to embrace the real-time demands of cloud-based gaming.

"At AMD, we pride ourselves on our ability to push the boundaries of what technology can do so it elevates the gaming experience," said Scott Herkelman, corporate vice president and general manager, Graphics Business Unit, AMD. "Oxide shares this passion and is an ideal partner for us as we expand the way gamers play, while delivering the quality experience they demand."

Today, AMD announced that 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors are powering the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute E3 platform, bringing a new level of high-performance computing to Oracle Cloud. Using the AMD EPYC 7742 processor, the Oracle Cloud "E3 standard" and the bare metal compute instances are available today and leverage key features of the Gen AMD EPYC processors including class-leading memory bandwidth and the highest core count for an x86 data center processor. These features enable the Oracle Cloud E3 platform to be well suited for both general purpose and high bandwidth workloads such as big data analytics, memory intense workloads and Oracle business applications.

AMD Financial Analyst Day presents an opportunity for AMD to talk straight with the finance industry about the company's current financial health, and a taste of what's to come. Guidance and product teasers made during this time are usually very accurate due to the nature of the audience. In this live blog, we will post information from the Financial Analyst Day 2020 as it unfolds.20:59 UTC: The event has started as of 1 PM PST. CEO Dr Lisa Su takes stage.

Ampere Computing, a startup focusing on making HPC and processors from cloud applications based on Arm Instruction Set Architecture, today announced the release of a first 80 core "cloud-native" processor based on the Arm ISA. The new Ampere Altra CPU is the company's first 80 core CPU meant for hyper scalers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Being built on TSMC's 7 nm semiconductor manufacturing process, the Altra is a CPU that is utilizing a monolithic die to achieve maximum performance. Using Arm's v8.2+ instruction set, the CPU is using the Neoverse N1 platform as its core, to be ready for any data center workload needed. It also borrows a few security features from v8.3 and v8.5, namely the hardware mitigations of speculative attacks.

When it comes to the core itself, the CPU is running at 3.0 GHz frequency and has some very interesting specifications. The design of the core is such that it is 4-wide superscalar Out of Order Execution (OoOE), which Ampere refers to as "aggressive" meaning that there is a lot of data throughput going on. The cache levels are structured in a way that there is 64 KB of L1D and L1I cache per core, along with 1 MB of L2 cache per core as well. For system-level cache, there is 32 MB of L3 available to the SoC. All of the caches have Error-correcting code (ECC) built-in, giving the CPU a much-needed feature. There are two 128-bit wide Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) units, which are there to do parallel processing if needed. There is no mention if they implement Arm's Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) or not.